In August, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy released a memo directing all federal agencies to form plans to make all federally funded research publications and data publicly available without embargo by the end of 2025.
This STAT story suggests that our enthusiasm about the US Presidential direction about government funded research being immediately available on an open access basis needs to be tempered. We are not about to see high profile publications become open access or reams of papers enter public circulation. Instead, more research outputs will become available via services such as PubMed Central. It should be observed that it is unlikely the general public has paid subscriptions with those services either. We have included links to six related items.
But that’s almost certainly not going to happen.
The OSTP memo specifies only that new embargo-free manuscripts must be publicly available “in agency-designated repositories” like PubMed Central, not on journal websites. Would-be readers are still going to have to trace new papers to the repository of the agency that funded the work in order to read them.
But key issues around the OSTP guidance remain unresolved. To what extent will journals shift their business models as a result? And what approach will they take to open access? Such issues, experts say, are weighty, with implications not only for scholarly publishing, one of the largest-margin industries in the world, but also for science itself.
Many people who don’t have an affiliation with a research institution — and thus don’t have institutional access to scholarly journal subscriptions — struggle with getting access to the latest paywalled research: nurses and doctors at health care facilities without research centers, people navigating their family members’ or their own diagnoses, or those who are simply curious about the research their tax dollars have funded.
